Chez Aristote

So, I have a baby now.

He wears pants. A lot of pants.

These are not even all the pants he owns.

We often go places and see other babies who are dressed to the nines, fitted out with collared shirts, hoodies, special tiny khakis, possibly name brand baby sneakers. Poor Frank has to put up with second-hand onesies and the fact that sometimes I forget to put on his socks, or pack a sleeper when it’s daytime, or realize too late we don’t even own some vital baby item. This makes me feel a little guilty, since the clothes one wears as a baby are a direct sign of the amount of love one’s parent has for one, or so the other mother/baby pairs seem to imply. But then I take heart when I remember his pants.

We’re using cloth diapers, for the most part (the kind known as prefolds, if you care); this requires many accoutrements, shown above, but pants are the most vital part. One can buy (as fancy as you wish) plastic PUL pants with (as fancy as you wish) cotton outer layers, but of course it’s cheaper to make your own covers, or soakers (this is a literal description of their function). I’ve used two different methods, knitted and sewn. It might seem counterintuitive to put wool pants on someone in the summer, but as I’ve discovered when wearing wool socks during that season, wool keeps feet cool and moves the sweat away from your skin; a convenient property to make use of in relation to baby pee.

I probably will try different patterns eventually, for even the free patterns are legion, but currently I’ve continued to make these. For fitting reasonably well, for staying on, and for looking nifty, I can certainly recommend them. The sewn ones are quicker to make, and this is important, because one can never really make as many pairs as one needs for a growing baby it seems; but the knitted ones are perhaps the more efficient at pee containment, although this may be due to the thin fabric I used for the sewn ones. We’ve needed pairs and pairs and pairs; he’s already outgrown the newborn size in both styles, and the size smalls I’ve stolen time to make are frighteningly snug.

The sewn variety are from this nice lady’s pattern; the fabric is old-man-sweater from Goodwill, run through the washing machine to provide some minor felting. They really do go quickly: I made about five pairs in one afternoon. As you may observe, I had a good time mixing and matching the sleeve and waistband ribbing from the original sweater to make amusing variations in the hip and waist bands. It’s a little tricky to ease in the narrow circumference of the hip bands, but not terribly so; I figured it gave me a lot of good set-in-sleeve practice. Nor is old-man-sweater a difficult fabric to sew; a ball point needle was the only change necessary. I was quite pleased at how easy they were to make in the end, a surprise for me as I had never attempted to actually sew from a downloaded pattern printed on 8×11.5″ before.

The knitted sort, these from a Curly-Purly pattern, look a little less dapper to my eye, due to the bulkier fabric, but perhaps are slightly better at pee containment. Most soaker patterns use worsted weight, and this is not simply catering to lazy knitters; the bulk and the loft of the worsted soak things up more than tightly spun four-ply would do, one presumes. This particular pattern is full of twists and turns: you’re always going to want to have short rows so that there’s more room for the bottom in the back, and I like the way the ribbing goes, but it’s a pain to carry around three sizes of needles, her method of making the waist smaller, and as you can see, it’s not perfectly successful at keeping the waist small through multiple wearings. They’ve never fallen off, but perhaps there’s a pattern out there that just has fewer stitches at the top than at the bottom. It also requires a knowledge on your part of grafting and sewn bind-off, which puts it out of the range of the knitters related to me who might help out and make a pair. Watch out for the leg bands–be sure to make them tight (don’t pick up too many stitches) to keep the poo in.

The temptation to dress up your kid following your highest aspirations or wildest whimsy is of course always present; the absolute tyrranny one possesses over the choice of clothes on a newborn can easily go to your head. Frank’s pants suit Frank; they’re not covered in cartoon characters or an imitation of a three-piece suit; sometimes they look a little hipster to me, sometimes a little sad-orphan, but they’re now inevitably and no doubt permanently part of Frank’s baby-character, and I’m proud I made them. And to the connoisseur of the handmade, at least, they make him look a little more loved.

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